A baby boomer goes job hunting

March 26, 2014

Updated April 8, 2014 6:32 p.m.

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Ruth Gueta, who started a new career later in life, found work at a hotel in Costa Mesa. She had no hotel experience but had transferable skills from her own business she ran for years. NICK AGRO, NICK AGRO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Ruth Gueta, who started a new career later in life, found work at a hotel in Costa Mesa. She had no hotel experience but had transferable skills from her own business she ran for years. NICK AGRO, NICK AGRO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Ruth Gueta is no shrinking violet. Originally from South Africa, she moved to the United States to start a new life. She ran a catering company in Texas before falling in love with Orange County beaches, settling here 13 years ago and opening a second catering business. She’s run marathons and climbed Mount Whitney.

Asked about her decision last year to stop being a boss and look for a job for the first time in 30 years, Gueta eloquently details the 33 workshops she took on resumé writing, interviewing skills and job hunting. She’s equally loquacious explaining how, after close to five months of looking, she networked her way into a position as a hotel catering manager.

There’s just one thing she clams up about: her age.

Gueta, who lives in Irvine and works at a boutique hotel near there, will only say she’s over 50, but doesn’t want to be defined by a number. Besides, looking for a job, she was “scared as hell because of my age and transferring careers,” she says.

Gueta is like a lot of midlife and older job hunters concerned that their age will hurt their chances of landing work, especially if they’re looking while unemployed.

Their fears are not unjustified.

People in their 40s, 50s and 60s might have a lower overall unemployment rate than their younger counterparts. But when they lose a job, they have a harder time returning to the workforce.

In California, 66 percent of people ages 55 to 64 who are unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, according to an analysis of 2012 census data by the California Budget Project. That’s more than twice the number of unemployeds under 25 who’ve been out of work six months or more, the Register’s Margot Roosevelt wrote in a recent series on long-term joblessness.

Ageism is one reason it’s harder for older workers to find a job. Potential employers fear – justly or not – that older workers won’t be able to keep up, won’t know the latest technology or will put in a few years and then retire.

A January CareerBuilder/Harris poll indicated that 66 percent of people who’ve been out of work for a long time feel their age or experience work against them in a job search. For people 55 and older, an overwhelming 92 percent feel their age is a detriment to finding work, according to the survey.

FIGHTING AGEISM

For a job interview, you can color gray roots, get a new suit, update your LinkedIn profile and take classes to brush up on software and social media skills.

Fighting ageism in job searches takes more than that.

Sometimes it’s picking up on little things. Anna Rembert, a Mission Viejo woman who gives her age as “early boomer,” says that in resumés, cover letters and job applications, it pays to mimic the lingo in companies’ job descriptions, all the better to avoid appearing old and out of it.

On job listings, “sourcing” is the new word for “buying,” and “onboarding” is the term companies use to describe the orientation process new employees go through, Rembert says. “People have to be aware of the new terminology.”

To appear younger in her job search, Rembert includes only her most recent work experience on her resumé. If she’s applying for a job where only a bachelor’s degree is required, she changes her resumé to omit the master’s degree she also holds, so it doesn’t appear that she’s overqualified.

If you haven’t been on a job interview in a while, prepare to answer different types of questions. These days, it’s common for companies to ask behavioral questions to elicit how someone would respond under pressure or in a typical work situation.

“I find that people don’t know how to answer those types of questions,” Rembert says of her job-seeking peers.

If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, age-proof your resumé and LinkedIn profile by stressing your experience without attaching a number to it. That means getting rid of phrases such as “more than 20 years of experience,” writes recruiter turned professional resumé writer Laura Smith-Proulx, in a post on her Career Rocketeer blog.

THE VALUE OF FACE TIME

Gueta reworked her resumé but didn’t rely on it alone to find a job.

She says having to find clients as a caterer taught her enough about sales to know she could sell herself better in person. That observation was confirmed when one hotel manager she met told her she wouldn’t have hired Gueta based on her resumé due to her lack of hotel industry experience, but would after meeting her in person.

A resumé is “just another piece of paper, but there’s just one of me,” Gueta says.

In addition to attending dozens of job-hunting workshops, Gueta did volunteer work that put her in touch with potential employers, but the biggest chunk of her job search was reserved for networking.

She asked friends and friends of friends for contacts in the hotel business she could connect with for pointers and leads. She set up informational interviews with hotel CFOs, general managers and other executives who helped her identify types of jobs she might want, hotels where she might be a good fit and names of people at the properties she should talk to.

Gueta followed up on their suggestions and ended up zeroing in on a particular property that seemed especially well suited to her personality. She called them, submitted a resumé, got called in for an interview and received unsolicited endorsements from a number of hotel types she’d chatted with. After going through several additional rounds of interviews, she was offered a job.

Four months into her new role, Gueta is happy to have swapped captaining her own ship with working as one of the crew.

ATTITUDE OVER AGE

Ultimately, age isn’t as big a factor as how someone fits in at a particular workplace, she says.

“You need to study the culture to know the kind of company it is,” she says. “There are certain companies that will only hire young people, that go for youth before experience. If I was going to interview at Google, maybe it would make a difference. But there are lots of places that value experience, like for example, a hotel.”

Attitude matters, too, and being willing to put yourself out there and admit there are things you don’t know but are willing to learn.

“I have friends I’ve met through my journey who are still looking for a job, and they’re much more qualified for what they do and younger than me,” she says. “I approach things with the mindset that I don’t know how to do things, and then I soak it in.”

Michelle V. Rafter writes about jobs and employment issues. Send questions about job hunting, careers or workplace issues to her at moneymatters@ocregister.com or find her on Twitter @MichelleRafter.

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